Turner's prized city: The great artist loved Lucerne and now it's staging an exhibition of his work

Switzerland wasn't Switzerland when J.M.W. Turner first came here,' says Fanni Fetzer, who has pulled off a major coup by organising an exhibition of 100 works of our greatest landscape painter in Lucerne, a city of only 80,000 people. An aerial view of Lucerne and the wooden Spreuer Bridge, which spans the River Reuss But Turner, with a canny eye on sales, was fascinated by the prospects that the looming shapes of the mountains and changing light on the lakes offered for dramatic new subjects. A sailing boat on Lake Lucerne with Mount Pilatus, a subject for Turner, in the background 'Atmosphere,' he once said, 'is my style,' and he was particularly inspired by Rigi, for its strong, shape, and the way it appears to change colour during the day. If you can't face the five hour walk to the summit of Mount Rigi there is a cogwheel railway Turner sometimes sketched from boats on the lake, so I take to the water on an elegant public steam boat.